Mastodawn

Look this isn’t at all a defense of slop code, but it has me thinking — how much does code quality matter, and why?

It’s maintenance, right? We care about readability because we know we’ll have to make changes, fix bugs, etc.

But so … imagine a codebase that’s magically bug-free and feature-complete. (I’m aware this is a strawman - that’s the point, it’s a thought experiment.) Does it matter if this codebase is well-written? I’m not sure it does! (1/5)

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Issac Kelly 1d ago

@jacob there are a lot of software engineers, and developers who have read assembly instructions in the last ten years. There are a lot more who haven’t.

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Nolan B 1d ago

@issackelly @jacob The assembly was replaced by higher level code that still needed to be maintained and understood.

I’d argue that sufficiently-specific and structured prompts will still need to be maintained, too. But with the caveat that it will be run through a fundamentally non-deterministic interpreter.

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jacobian 1d ago

@palendae @issackelly But also isn’t non-determinism sort of the point of LLMS? Like it’s not something you can just turn off, right? (This is a genuine question, not a bit - I really don’t know.)

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Sharif Naas

@jacob @palendae @issackelly Non-determinism of LLMs is an implementation detail (it may be desired, too, but that's separate). Determinism could be achieved with (currently) a hit in performance.